Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix Chapter Notes

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Chapter 37: The Lost prophecy

• The entire conversation between Harry and Dumbledore in this chapter remains one of my favourite in the entire season. Something J.K. Rowling is extremely good at is to write about loss and grief. In a way Harry experiences it for the first time – he was too young when his parents died and Cedric’s death left him in shock, but then again they didn’t really knew it each other. This time it is different. And my reading experience changed, because I have experienced a loss similar like Harry (like Rowling, who had lost her mother shortly before she started writing the Potter series) between the first time I read the book as a teenager and now again as an adult. It might be because Rowling had lost a parent that so much about Harry’s grief resonates with me. It feels real.

• “It was his fault Sirius had died; it was all his fault. If he, Harry, had not been stupid enough to fall for Voldemort’s trick, if he had not been so convinced that what he had seen in his dream was real, if he had only opened his mind to the possibility that Voldemort was, as Hermione had said, banking on Harry’s love of playing the hero … It was unbearable, he would not think about it, he could not stand it … there was a terrible hollow inside him he did not want to feel or examine, a dark hole where Sirius had been, where Sirius had vanished; he did not want to have to be alone with that great, silent space, he could not stand it –“ – Sirius’s death is not what causes Harry’s depression, but it certainly factors to it. The anxiety, the impossibility to escape your own thoughts, and how he blames himself for Sirius’s death, despite all logic and rational thought saying he can’t be blamed. And it is what makes things even worse – not just losing Sirius, but the circumstances, that Harry fall for Voldemort’s trap, that it was the love they felt for each other that brought both Harry and Sirius to the Department of Mysteries to save the other. That Harry should have known better, that Hermione (who always represent logic and rational thought) even warned him it could be a trap. Harry let his heart decide for him, he did what he felt was right. And whenever we make a mistake because we let our heart decide for us we feel foolish and weak. Dumbledore will tell Harry later that it was his heart that saved him, but to Harry it is his heart that failed him.

• “The guilt filling the whole of Harry’s chest like some monstrous, weighty parasite, now writhed and squirmed. Harry could not stand this, he could not stand being himself any more … he had never felt more trapped inside his own head and body, never wished so intensely that he could be somebody, anybody, else …” – The thing about Harry is that the moment he entered the Wizarding World, the moment he learned he was famous, he has always been confronted with the image others have of him. The boy who lived, the tragic hero. In the last year he has been portrayed as a liar, mentally unstable, attention seeking. He has never let himself defined by these things, knowing they are not true. Now though he sees himself different: as the one responsible for Sirius’s death. He never claimed to be a hero, but it has never been less true than now. Ironically it is his hero-complex, as Hermione calls it, that brought all of his friends in danger, that did cost Sirius his life (at least from Harry’s perspective). It is unbearable to connect himself with the image of a hero others have painted of him, now that he has made a terrible mistake, that he did not save the day, but is the one who brought everyone in danger in the first place.

• “‘I know how you’re feeling, Harry,’ said Dumbledore very quietly. ‘No, you don’t,’ said Harry, and his voice was suddenly loud and strong; white-hot anger leapt inside him; Dumbledore knew nothing about his feelings.” – Dumbledore of course has experienced loss and grief himself, but he also knows how it feels to think you are responsible for someone’s else death, as he blames himself for his sister’s death. But Harry does not know this, and he does not ask Dumbledore either, because we always feel like our pain is individual, like nobody could ever know how we really feel. Grief and loss are very personal feelings, because everybody experiences them in a different way, and at times it feels like it creates a barrier between yourself and the rest of the world.

• “‘Harry, suffering like this proves you are still a man! This pain is part of being human –’ ‘THEN – I – DON’T – WANT – TO – BE – HUMAN!’ Harry roared […] ‘I DON’T CARE!’ Harry yelled at them, snatching up a lunascope and throwing it into the fireplace. ‘I’VE HAD ENOUGH, I’VE SEEN ENOUGH, I WANT OUT, I WANT IT TO END, I DON’T CARE ANY MORE –’ He seized the table on which the silver instrument had stood and threw that, too. It broke apart on the floor and the legs rolled in different directions. ‘You do care,’ said Dumbledore. He had not flinched or made a single move to stop Harry demolishing his office. His expression was calm, almost detached. ‘You care so much you feel as though you will bleed to death with the pain of it.’” – This always reminds me of a poem by Mary Oliver, “The Uses of Sorrow”: “Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.” Dumbledore, in his age and wisdom, knows that experiencing pain the way Harry does, is part of being human, or as he even says it is a proof of being human (and therefore would make Voldemort unhuman). We can’t understand pain like this when we right in the middle of it. Harry experiences it for the first time really and he feels like he will never get over it, like nothing will ever be whole again, that this is the final straw. In time he will learn that you can live with the pain, but you never get used to it. And once he understands what Voldemort has done to his soul, he will understand Dumbledore’s words and what a great gift it is to feel that deeply.

• “Voldemort’s aim in possessing you, as he demonstrated tonight, would not have been my destruction. It would have been yours. He hoped, when he possessed you briefly a short while ago, that I would sacrifice you in the hope of killing him.” – But in the end that is exactly what happens: Dumbledore sacrifices Harry in order to kill Voldemort. And that might have been a part of Dumbledore’s plan as well: that after this night Voldemort was convinced that Dumbledore would never do such a thing, that when Harry sacrificed himself in the end Voldemort never assumed that it was part of Dumbledore’s plan.

• “‘Kreacher is what he has been made by wizards, Harry,’ said Dumbledore.” – It is interesting that it was Sirius who told Harry that in order to understand someone’s true nature you should look how they treat their inferiors not their equals. Of course Sirius did not hate Kreacher because he is a house elf, but rather because he was a constant reminder of the family/home he hated so much. He could not show Kreacher even the simplest form of respect. And house-elves, bound to their families, always become a product of how their masters treat them. And Dumbledore, unlike Voldemort and many other wizards, never underestimated house-elves. They are individuals, they have feelings, and they have magic of their own. And they are always overlooked, which can make them incredible dangerous.

• “ ‘Five years ago you arrived at Hogwarts, Harry, safe and whole, as I had planned and intended. Well – not quite whole. You had suffered. I knew you would when I left you on your aunt and uncle’s doorstep. I knew I was condemning you to ten dark and difficult years.’” – I think this is the first time someone actually acknowledges in words the abuse Harry had to endure. That what happened to him was neither right or fair, despite Dumbledore explaining the reason why he had to stay with the Dursleys.

• “Did I believe that Voldemort was gone for ever? No. I knew not whether it would be ten, twenty or fifty years before he returned, but I was sure he would do so, and I was sure, too, knowing him as I have done, that he would not rest until he killed you.” – Imagine though it would have taken Voldemort 70 years to return, the book series would have been quite different.

• “‘While you can still call home the place where your mother’s blood dwells, there you cannot be touched or harmed by Voldemort. He shed her blood, but it lives on in you and her sister. Her blood became your refuge. You need return there only once a year, but as long as you can still call it home, whilst you are there he cannot hurt you. Your aunt knows this. I explained what I had done in the letter I left, with you, on her doorstep. She knows that allowing you houseroom may well have kept you alive for the past fifteen years.’” – First, I still can’t believe that Dumbledore could not be bothered to explain this in person, that all he did was to write a letter. Second, the very complicated relationship Petunia has with her nephew. Harry claims that she does not love him, which might be true. Regardless she loved her sister. She took Harry in because her sister gave her life to protect him, because she knew that if she wouldn’t Harry would die. And yet Harry is a constant reminder of Lily, of Petunia’s loss, of all the complicated feelings she had towards Lily. And interesting enough both Petunia and Snape help to keep Harry alive, they both protect him in their own ways, but out of respect and love towards Lily, because he is her son, nothing more. It is not just her blood that protects Harry, but also the relationships Lily made while she was alive, the people who loved her.

• “‘I cared about you too much,’ said Dumbledore simply. ‘I cared more for your happiness than your knowing the truth, more for your peace of mind than my plan, more for your life than the lives that might be lost if the plan failed. In other words, I acted exactly as Voldemort expects we fools who love to act.” – Dumbledore thinks that his flaw, that the mistake that he made, was that he cared too much about Harry, that his happiness became more important than the lives of others. And many criticized Dumbledore for his final plan: that in the end Harry had to give his own life in order to defeat Voldemort. But this is exactly what this is about: that Harry’s life is no more important than the lives of thousands. Some see Dumbledore as cruel and manipulating, and perhaps they are right. But he still cares. He cares so much about Harry and yet he knows what he needs to ask of him, knows what it will take to end Voldemort. And one could ask what is more cruel: to sacrifice one live so thousands can live or to accept the pain of the many in exchange for one man’s happiness?

• “I had gone there to see an applicant for the post of Divination teacher, though it was against my inclination to allow the subject of Divination to continue at all.” – I mean honestly, it is the most useless subject ever.

• So, the prophecy. It reveals something that to the readers might be obvious, but this is the first time we actually hear it: that Harry is the only one who has the power to defeat Voldemort. And Harry of course is famous because he survived the Killing Curse, but perhaps he thought that there might not be a special reason why Voldemort wanted to kill him and his parents. After all Voldemort and his followers killed so many. Perhaps Harry thought Voldemort simply wanted to finish what he had started, that this time he wants to kill Harry because of what has happened to him. Maybe deep down Harry had wondered if there might be more about it, what the real reason was that Voldemort had considered a baby as a threat. If he did he probably ignored that thought, because as Dumbledore explains, it is an incredible burden to live with this knowledge.

• Then of course there is the fact that it could have been Neville as well. There are many speculations what would have happened if Voldemort had chosen Neville instead. I always assumed that Alice Longbottom, just as Lily did, would have sacrificed herself for her son, giving Neville the same kind of protection Harry had. Neville would have still grown up with his grandmother (and through her blood he would be protected as well) though with even more pressure put upon him. But I always loved the fact that it could have been someone else, that in a way there was nothing special about Harry, and that of course the irony is that in choosing Harry Voldemort marked him as an equal and gave him the power to destroy him (though Voldemort of course was not aware of this, as he had not heard the whole prophecy). And Voldemort did not choose the son of two Aurors, the pureblood wizard, but Harry instead, the halfblood, because as Dumbledore explains, he saw himself in Harry.

• The thing about prophecies is of course whether or not they become true, and in fiction they usually do, especially if people try to avoid their fate. Voldemort did not hear the full prophecy, he did not know that he would be the one to mark his enemy as an equal. The question is, if he had that knowledge and never had tried to kill Harry or Neville, could he have avoided his fate?

• Also, we don’t know it yet, but of course it was Snape who had overheard the first part of the prophecy, which made me wonder what he was doing there in the first place. Was it a coincidence? Was he there on Voldemort’s order, spying on Dumbledore? And how come he would not know or figure out that the prophecy could refer to Lily’s son, and therefore would put her in danger by telling Voldemort about it?

• “In the end, it mattered not that you could not close your mind. It was your heart that saved you.” – Harry has never been and will never be the most talented wizard, but that did not matter. It does not matter how advanced the magic is that Voldemort works. It is Harry’s ability to love, and the love of his mother, that saves him. And that is something you can’t learn or achieve. If Voldemort has ever been able to love he successfully got rid of this ability. To him love is a weakness, something he never understood and always underestimated. And in Rowling’s work it is essential our ability to love what makes us human. And losing that has made Voldemort dead long before he actually died.

• “‘So,’ said Harry, dredging up the words from what felt like a deep well of despair inside him, ‘so does that mean that … that one of us has got to kill the other one … in the end?’ ‘Yes,’ said Dumbledore.” – Just moments before Harry told Dumbledore that he doesn’t have powers like Voldemort does, that he can’t kill someone, and yet he has to or he will be killed. In the end however he defeated Voldemort without actually killing him, and I always loved that he didn’t have to become a murderer.